I've never tried snowshoes. I guess they're good in tight places where skis are in the way, but I imagine I would feel very restricted without skis where skis allows you to just slide effortlessly. Uphill I guess skis vs shoes isn't a big deal, at least not with skins attached to the skis. Sometimes I use skins to go more or less straight downhill rather than doing slalom. Most of the time, though, I just ski in the forest in machine made tracks.This is the 12th season of my automatic snow depth gauge, and I might get a new record for the lowest maximum snow depth for a season, despite an early start of the snow season this autumn. Today the depth is 40 cm, the highest this winter. The record low is 48 cm, there's not much more snow in the forecast, and spring is approaching with dryer and warmer weather. Easter is late this year, so perhaps it will be hard to find good cross country skiing in Oslo this year. :/ It's been a somewhat lousy winter, though just enough 100 meter uphill from here to give acceptable skiing except a couple of weeks in December.

Along the Alps in Italy ski season was barely saved by artificial snow. Almost perfect, durable, but nonetheless in poor quantity. It was a bit disturbing to see some of well known mountain profiles not being capped by snow.The problem for spring and summer ahead will be surely water. Basins which normally are full this year have not enough water, with practically nil precipitation throughout the past season.

In central Italy unfortunately, bashed by earthquakes and abnormally abundant snow, the issue seems the inverse, high risk of flooding for basins.

This thread is a little old now, but I'm surprised to see my local weather being discussed on the SE forums This last summer I climbed the mountain (Shuksan) visible in that video of the artists point road! There certainly was an unusual amount of snow at lower elevations this year.

For the last 4 months I've spent about 8 hours a week working out how electrons behave quantum mechanically, and yet the more I understand about electrons the less I understand what the **** an electron is.

For the last 4 months I've spent about 8 hours a week working out how electrons behave quantum mechanically, and yet the more I understand about electrons the less I understand what the **** an electron is.

Heard about them but it doesn't look like the idea works very well. As black holes the electrons would have to be more than extremely rotating, which -- aside from raising a number of difficult questions -- violates causal rules by introducing closed time-like curves. My philosophical intuitions could be wrong but until we observe evidence of CTCs then any time I encounter them in a model I conclude the model is unphysical.

Even if it does work I don't think it actually adds much in the way of weirdness to how weird electrons already are. I can at least (mostly) mentally grasp the behavior of a black hole.

Anyway freaking electrons moving in large numbers man watch out those things are dangerous.

Heard about them but it doesn't look like the idea works very well. As black holes the electrons would have to be more than extremely rotating, which -- aside from raising a number of difficult questions -- violates causal rules by introducing closed time-like curves. My philosophical intuitions could be wrong but until we observe evidence of CTCs then any time I encounter them in a model I conclude the model is unphysical.

Even if it does work I don't think it actually adds much in the way of weirdness to how weird electrons already are. I can at least (mostly) mentally grasp the behavior of a black hole.

Anyway freaking electrons moving in large numbers man watch out those things are dangerous.

Something I found really interesting (going back to the cosmic scale) is if we perform some calculations we find that the universe comes really close to actually being inside a black hole (something I feel is true and black hole cosmology can unite relativity and quantum mechanics.) Did you read the other article in this field I posted which was about a local causality violation that was discovered? It should be somewhere on this page.

I feel that mathematics lies at the root of the universe (for example, the article I posted about the gaps in prime numbers coming close to matching the gaps in energy levels in atoms) consider the universe to be a cosmic quantum computer and a "natural" AI in its own right- and since the quantum scale is the most basic scale we know about, there should be a direct connection right there. Why causality only enters into the picture at a higher level (along with the arrow of time- to which it is closely connected) makes me think that causality/arrow of time is a product of multiple interactions rather than something basic and elementary. The interactions that go against causality/forward arrow of time get canceled out and what remains is what we experience at the classic level (similar to why we can't find antimatter in the universe.)

Also- on an intuitive level, I feel that being a part of what we observe, it couldn't be any other way. There may be other universes with arrows of time going in other directions (some theories mathematically explore this) but for the denizens of those universes their arrow of time would be forward relative to them, just like ours is forward relative to us. However if we could perceive that universe we may see their arrow of time differently (for example, reverse of ours) and vice versa. It's like being on two different conveyor belts going in different directions but not being able to see the other conveyor belt, so although each conveyor belt is going in an opposite direction compared to the other, the denizens of each feel that their conveyor belt is going forward- because they both are, relative to themselves. Time, like space, is relative. Causality may be relative too, but we don't know it since it is the same for all members of a closed system (that is, the universe.) We don't have that other perspective to glean data from.

Late April (or early May) snowfalls after the lawn has resurfaced happen in the occasional year in Oslo, but last day's snowfall here was actually the largest one this winter. It rather points to a remarkable winter than to a remarkable spring. The second largest snowfall (about 25cm) was on 5 November. Between, the skiing opportunities nearly vanished several times, but it's been a long season.